After Gemma’s death, the granddaughter travels to Poland to investigate the unusual connection between her grandmother, the fairy tale and the holocaust (Crockett, 2020). Her earliest memories of her grandmother, Gemma, consist of listening to her telling the tale of Sleeping Beauty, also known as Briar Rose. In this way, Jane Yolen presents the main character of her story, Becca, as a young adult who lives in the USA in the 1990s. 366) also recognizes the ability of fairy tales to provide comfort and closure since the adults who had catastrophic experiences classify them by following the “fairy-tale landscape, attempting to transform trauma through desire for the reconstituted safety of home”. Indeed, literary scholar Donald Haase (2000, p. Therefore, it is not bizarre that some people have ended up creating fictional worlds in an attempt to hide reality and face the painful effects of their trauma (San José Rico & Mezquita Fernández, 2011). In the former case, the experience is unintentionally blocked by the person to evade the traumatic past. Likewise, the victims of severe traumas often hide the devastating consequences of their experiences in two ways: the repression of the terrorizing memories can be unconscious or it can be a deliberate process. Storytellers have used the rich world of fairy tales to examine the nuances of human personality. Hence, this method promotes an empathetic response to the story, as readers embark on the same journey as their fictitious counterparts. This “dialogue with the silence” encourages readers to take part in the story since they have to actively decipher what lies beneath the narration and, thus, think like the characters (Kokkola, 2003, p. In other words, a book that leaves some gaps in information can be more emotionally profound than one that tries to explain everything. For instance, Rosenfeld (1980) focuses on literature of fragmentation, which consists of leaving unsaid what cannot and must not be described or understood. The authors must carefully narrate their stories and follow a series of moral principles since their novels “carry a significant responsibility” (Rachel Dean-Ruzicka, 2017, p. Nevertheless, the literary debate focuses on how situations of this magnitude can be approached in an ethical way (San José Rico & Mezquita Fernández). As time passes, fewer survivors remain to pass down their first-hand experiences, which places literature in a significant position to educate younger generations. 14), “the Holocaust is an integral part of twenty-first-century children’s and young adult literature” and, therefore, the account of the notorious event is not only pertinent but necessary. According to Rachel Dean-Ruzicka (2017, p.
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